When you got up this morning and were wondering what would happen on this first day of winter, 2025, a gigantic mud explosion probably wasn't on your mental list. And yet, that's what has happened, in the famous Yellowstone Park's Black Diamond Pool - a big, sloppy, wet mud explosion. Hot mud, too - this was a volcanic event.
Shocking mud eruption at Yellowstone's black diamond pool caught on webcam pic.twitter.com/neSIX6R1NC
— New York Post (@nypost) December 21, 2025
An Associated Press piece has some more details about the icky event.
“Kablooey!”
That’s the word U.S. Geological Survey volcanic experts used to describe a muddy eruption at Black Diamond Pool in Yellowstone National Park on Saturday morning.
Video shared by the USGS on social media shows mud spraying up and out from the pool just before 9:23 a.m. in Biscuit Basin about midway between park favorites Old Faithful and Grand Prismatic.
Other recent eruptions have mostly been audible and not visible, because they happened either at night or when the camera was obscured by ice.
The agency said the Black Diamond Pool was previously the site of a hydrothermal explosion, in July 2024, that sent rocks and mud flying hundreds of feet high and damaged a boardwalk. It prompted the closure of the area to visitors due to the damage and the potential for additional hazardous activity.
So-called dirty eruptions reaching up to 40 feet (about 12 meters) have occurred sporadically since then.
Nobody was injured in this event, and that's a good thing. But with this location, there's no guarantee about something much worse happening - that is, sometime in the next few thousand years.
Here's the onion:
Park officials say Yellowstone preserves the most extraordinary collection of hot springs, geysers, mud pots and fumaroles on Earth. More than 10,000 hydrothermal features are found within the park, over 500 of them geysers.
There's a good reason for this little piece of national park trivia.
Read More: What's Going on With the Ring of Fire? Now It's a Volcano in Russia.
Signs of Reawakening: Italian Supervolcano Could Send World Spinning Into Chaos
Specifically, there is so much hydrothermal and volcanic activity in Yellowstone because the entire Yellowstone basin sits atop a massive megavolcano. That basin is a gigantic volcanic caldera, perched atop a stupendous magma reservoir. There have been three major, caldera-forming eruptions that we know of: About 2.1 million years ago, about 1.3 million years ago, and the last one about 640,000 years ago. There have been smaller eruptions and lava flows since then, but these three were real crowd-pleasers.
The first puffed out what is now called the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff, which covered about 1.3 million square miles with volcanic ash, from the Pacific Ocean to Iowa and Texas. This eruption was over 6,000 times the power of the Mt. St. Helens' blast.
The second gave us the Mesa Falls Tuff, which covered over a thousand square miles with ash, a piker by comparison to the Huckleberry Ridge event, but still 700 times bigger than Mt. St. Helens.
Finally, the last major event produced the Lava Creek Tuff, which covered a million and a half square miles with ash, and was 2,500 times more powerful than the Mt. St. Helens eruption.
Just for fun, here's a map of those events.
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) December 21, 2025
Yellowstone - the park, not the television show, although the show is pretty darn good - is one of North America's major attractions. It's a land of unparalleled beauty. It's also a land that conceals a ticking time bomb beneath it, one that, if it really goes up big, could pretty much end human civilization in North America. Fortunately for us, it may not yet go off big like that again for thousands of years, if it ever does.
So, no reason to cancel your New Year's Eve plans.
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